How 2 Presidents Saved the Declaration of Independence (Janice Rogers Brown, 10.10/25, Coolidge Review)
Lincoln passionately defended the Declaration’s principle of equality during his Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Douglas argued that the signers of the Declaration referred only “to white men, to men of European birth and European descent, when they declared the equality of all men.”
Lincoln rejected this claim. During a July 10 speech in Chicago, he said: “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior…. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.” Lincoln called the Declaration’s insistence on the equality of all men “the father of all moral principle.”
The next year, in a letter reflecting on the anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth, Lincoln wrote:
All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
Lincoln showed his commitment to this abstract truth in the Gettysburg Address. America, he said, was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Civil War, he said, was a test not just for America but for “any nation so conceived and so dedicated.”
The political philosopher Harry Jaffa notes that Lincoln’s interpretation of “all men are created equal” transformed that proposition from a “pre-political, negative, minimal” norm that “prescribes what civil society ought not to be” into “a transcendental affirmation of what it ought to be.” […]
In his 1926 speech at Independence Hall, Coolidge acknowledged that the right of people to choose their own rulers was an old idea—detailed by the Dutch as early as July 26, 1581, and by the British people in their long struggle with the Stuarts. But he insisted that “we should search those charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality.” It was this equality principle that Coolidge deemed “profoundly revolutionary.”
The Declaration mattered, Coolidge said, not because it established a new nation but because it established “a nation on new principles.” The Declaration’s preamble set out “three very definite propositions” regarding “the nature of mankind and therefore of government”: “the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.”